I am looking to optimize the mount options when mounting a disk to write large files to under linux (Ubuntu 16).
Specifically, mounting an external EXT4 USB 3 drive to backup VM files (~10G) and also copy over video files (~8G). Copying from an internal drive to the external USB.
I started with the original fstab entry and tested different options. Below are the original and optimized entries.
My question is this:
Are there any other optimizations that can be made and of the current optimizations, are there any risk to data integrity?
# Western Digital My Passport 25E2
# original
#UUID=4021ff7e-d371-495b-ad13-b33233fece55 /media/wd01 ext4 rw,noauto,nouser,sync 0 2
# optimized
UUID=4021ff7e-d371-495b-ad13-b33233fece55 /media/wd01 ext4 rw,noauto,nouser,data=writeback,noatime 0 2
- Removed
sync, should allow optimization of writes, but must wait until all writes are complete before disconnecting - Added
data=writeback, better suited to writing large files - Added
noatime, does not update the file system for files which are simply being read, saw minor speed improvements that may be coincidental
Testing with:
date
sudo rsync -rv /vm/example-disk0.qcow2 /media/wd01/ \
--progress && date && tput bel && tput bel && tput bel
Original:
example-disk0.qcow2
16,149,905,408 100% 33.59MB/s 0:07:38 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1)
Optimized:
example-disk0.qcow2
16,149,905,408 100% 132.74MB/s 0:01:56 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1)
